Dad bikes and baby seats

Sorry for the blogging radio silence, but I don't get paid for this so... tough.

Anyway, I am a bike guy. I'm not a hardcore, single-speed, fixie-bike, disregard-all-traffic-laws-while-wearing-a-pink-tank-top,-a-pair-of-cut-off-skinny-black-denim-girl-jeans-and-dock-shoes. But I like bikes.

Bike psychoanalysis... after the jump

I can for example trace my bike lineage. First I had a black BMX(that's the bike I lost my training wheels on). Then I ahd a blue Trek Antelope that my parents for me for my 12th-ish birthday. Then I had a Univega, but back when they were cool. When I started college I got a beautiful orange 2000 Specialized Rock Hopper mountain bike with a Manitou shock. It is possibly the most perfect piece of bike geometry ever created by mortals. It was also my first bike-love. I thought I would never get over her... until Big Red.

D bought me Big Red, a 2007 Specialized Rock Hopper with 3" tires and Rock Shox front suspension, for my birthday when we first got to G'ville and were totally broke. She had to leverage both my parents and hers to come up with the cash. Seeing it lying against our couch in the living room for the first time felt just like when I got that Trek as a little boy.

I have since swapped out my mud bogging tires for a pair of economical 3/4" commuters and added a bike rack and lights (front and rear as required by law). And now that we have finally bought a bike carrier for Finley, I am starting to see that our my relationship with Big Red may be on the ropes. Not literally because I have no job, but figuratively.

We got Finn a Beto bike carrier this week. It's not super fancy. It does however mounts on a bike rack and it was reasonably priced. We can get another rack for about $30 so that the seat can easily move from my bike to D's. The padding is pretty light and I'm afraid the plastic might breakdown if exposed to direct sunlight for too long, but it will be fine for Finn for a few years and may work for a sib or two as well. It's sort of the Ikea of bike seats.

What's important is that Finn likes it and handled an 8 mile ride today without complaint. Every once and a while I could feel his weight shift and I would look back to see him peering over the edge at the ground whizzing by. I imagine his internal dialogues went something like, "weeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

My few problems with the seat probably have more to do with the fact that I am fitting it to my beloved mountain bike. For instance, I had to really pry the bottom mounts of the rack apart to fit the screw holes on my frame. And when I put my feet in my strapless toe clips, I have to point my toes way down so that I don't hit Finn's feet on the return.

So I have at least one more adjustment to make to Big Red - I need to remove the toe clips. Which means no more awesome jumps.

What a dad really needs for co-transport is something a bit more upright and spacious. Something with a chain guard. Something designed to be ridden by working stiffs in khakis and belts. Something with 6 places to hold coffee (diapers, snacks, shoes, extra socks, and band-aids too). Something with front saddle bags. Something  a little less cool, but way more functional. A dad needs a commuter.

This is a tough realization for me, a mountain bike guy. I mean try to tell fixie bike to put some brakes on her contraption. Admittedly, I have not even taken my bike off a curb in several years, let alone rode it over a stump or a log or a-bridge-that-goes-up-into-a-tree-followed-by-a-monster-jump. But a bike says a lot about a person. My mountain bike used to say I was a little rugged, that I enjoyed primitive camping, that I read Hemingway. It said I could shred. So I don't shred and possible have never shredded. But if a total stranger saw me on my bike and didn't know about the book of poetry in my backpack, they would think that a) I could shred, b) if I wasn't shredding right now it was because I was late for a rock concert or something and c) that I would definitely be shredding later in the day, probably twice as hard as needed to make up for the time I lost riding my bike on the sidewalk.

But it also said that I didn't have kids. And admittedly I am a bit older. I am ready to concede that it might be a little more comfortable to sit up a when I am biking to Starbucks. And I would probably just hurt myself if I even thought of leaving the pavement anymore anyway. And sometimes I like to wear khakis. And I have been sort of eyeing up this sweat little Kona.